We laughed, we cried, we fell off our bikes like jackasses. Part Duh -I mean Part Duex

Well, at least I did. I had stopped by the shop to get a weird jump in my rear wheel checked out when I ran into Brian. I’ve run into him a few times before, and use to ride with him on the group rides back when I was riding more. He’s a tad older than me, but comparatively speaking he is in excellent condition. He races for Team MAC I believe. Now I had every intention of getting the wheel checked out and doing an easy hour or so because I told Chas I’d be back around 7:15 or so. Well, Joel has been saying if I want to get faster, I need to ride with faster people, and when it comes to training and bikes, I tend to listen to Joel. Or at least I try to; he usually tells me to do something, I blow it off two or three times, then I try it, but then I usually jack it up, just like I did this time. So, when Brian asked if I wanted to go for a ride I said sure. We decided to head towards Waterman, which usually ends up being a 20-25 mile loop or out and back depending on who is navigating. He said he had a rough day at work (he’s a carpenter),was recovering from a weekend race, and he was going to keep it under 17 mph. Now anybody who’s ever gone on a fast group ride knows what this means, he’s going hammer me into the ground.

Surprisingly, he didn’t, we lit out of town around 19 mph, and held that for a few miles. We actually hit a train on 23, which never happens, in fact, in 3 years of off and on riding, I have never hit a train there. So we diverted to some side roads and I got lost. Brian asked about heart rate, and I told him it was 162. He then said we should back off and he dropped down to about 17 mph! My heart rate immediately hit 180. Had I told Joel I was pushing 165 bpm at 19 mph, he would have laughed, called me a freak or a wuss, make some comment about lactate something or other and speed it up to 21 mph. I miss Joel.

So we were zigging and zagging down some side roads, had to turn around a few times because the pavement ended when Brian veered off to make a right, I slowed a little more, veered a little wide behind him and hit gravel. It looked like clean pavement to me, but I didn’t have my glasses on so who knows. Brian happened to be looking back, and I saw his eyes bugging out a nanosecond before my front tire started washing out. For a split second I almost recoverd, but in the end I was over taken by gravity. At the last second I realized I was going down on my brand new totally pimp’m cranks and threw out my hip to save them. Just kidding, I’m not anywhere near that bad assed, I just kind of happened to fall that way.

I had to readjust my front brake, whack my hood back into place, and shake some gravel out of the shifter, but otherwise the bike was OK. The side of my calf got scraped up, my elbow and forearm got a little banged up, and I got some road rash on my hip. I would have gotten a picture of that too, but do you guys really want to see my pale hairy ass? The missing 3 square inches of epidermis doesn’t exactly improve the image much, trust me. Besides, I don’t want to have to go through the headache of putting adult content warnings and age disclaimer crap up on this blog.

The long and short of it, I’ll be a little stiff the next few days, but I’ll live. Tomorrow’s group ride should loosen everything up, or if not, hopefully snap it back into place.

I’ll do some catching up tomorrow; get all the mileage and gory details about my weekend of culinary debauchery and all that. For now, I can sum it up in one 3 digit number-226!!!! Yoiks! As much as I ate, and as much as I didn’t ride, I’m surprised it’s not more.